The world of Ibn Ṭufayl: interdisciplinary perspectives on Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān

provides us with several answers. First, in recent decades there has been a revival of homeopathic medicine, especially in Germany. The renewed popularity among patients of homeopathic remedies must at least in part be attributed to dissatisfaction with "scientific medicine", the elite of which seems primarily interested in modem medicine's technical tools; as Roy Porter put it in his perceptive analysis on 'How medicine became a prisoner of its success' (TLS, 14 Jan. 1994, pp. 3-4): "Where patients are seen as problems and reduced to biopsies and lab tests, no wonder sections of the public vote with their feet, and opt for styles of holistic medicine that present themselves as more humane". Second, the historiography of medicine itself has changed, and with its broadened scope of "medical culture in society" has begun to give serious consideration to unorthodox medical theories as well as folk medicine and non-Western medical traditions. Whatever the merits of homeopathy may be, it is a fact that practitioners and patients have in large numbers and in many different countries practised its precepts. This asks for historical explanations, and the Weltgeschichte der Homoopathie provides these, for a wide range of European countries well as for Brazil and, the "late homeopathic superpower", India. A third reason for the historiographical rehabilitation of homeopathy-a reason, not mentioned in so many words in this volume-has been the financial clout of the Robert Bosch Foundation in Stuttgart and its Institute for the History of Medicine-clout used in support of a research programme to put Hahnemann and his tradition on the historical map. Both the editor and one of the principal contributors, Robert Jutte, are members of the Institute. They are historians-with-a-mission, and the emphasis of the book on homeopathy as a global movement is not only a matter of factual documentation, but serves to legitimize present-day homeopathic medicine. This connection with the current affairs of alternative medical practice has not diminished the scholarly quality of the collection. The scholarship is sophisticated, original and rich. The several ways in which homeopathy spread across Europe and to the Americas and Asia are examined from a variety of angles, such as personal networks (especially networks of patients), translations of major treatises, homeopathic journals (many of which were founded during the second half of the nineteenth century), international congresses, and also the commercial angle of the production of homeopathic remedies. The authors of the different chapters, …